Friday, March 31, 2017

Michael Harris writes that, as the Conservative leadership race comes down to the finish, you have to wonder what the party learned under Stephen Harper's tutelage:

Some days it’s hard to tell if the Dubious Fourteen are political birds
of a feather — or warring members of rival motorcycle gangs. There are
no excuses for the tawdry display of ego and ambition that so far has
passed for a leadership race. For one thing, the party should have
learned its lessons from the years of lying, cheating and
democracy-busting in the Harper era.

Consider the sound an fury over phony Tories and the echoes of those robocalls:

This is no small matter. Party rules require that memberships be purchased by personal credit cards or cheques. As candidate Chris Alexander said, this
was not just a case of people being signed up to memberships without
their knowledge. Someone was using software that masked IP addresses and
allowed multiple members to be signed up from the same computer —
high-tech cheating not entirely unlike the variety used in the unsolved
robocalls scandal.

Kevin O'Leary is threatening to use the notwithstanding clause against the provinces:

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Two days ago, as Donald Trump signed an executive order to roll back Barack Obama's environmental legacy, he was surrounded by coal miners. “Come on, fellas,” Trump said. “You know what this is? You know what it says, right? You’re going back to work.” It was all part of the con. E. J. Dionne writes:

Trump already signaled his indifference to the lives of his
working-class supporters by backing the failed House Republican health
care bill. It would have deprived 24 million Americans of health
insurance. And the administration’s next big priority is corporate tax
cuts, not an issue high on voters’ wish lists in Erie, Pennsylvania, or
Bay County, Michigan.

Then again, not many proletarians hang around at the Trump resorts and
golf courses where our commander in chief has already spent nearly a
third of his time in office.

It is a con being played on the country's most vulnerable citizens:

In a paper released last week by the Brookings Institution (with which I
am associated), they show that the rising death rates among less
well-off whites aged 45-54 contrast sharply with the falling death rates
among comparably placed citizens in Europe.

“Mortality declines from the two biggest killers in middle age—cancer
and heart disease—were offset by marked increases in drug overdoses,
suicides and alcohol-related liver mortality,” they write.

We are living in a society where the long-standing injustices of racial
discrimination against African-Americans and Latinos are compounded by
the injuries of class. These afflict all lower income groups, but they
are currently hitting white Americans particularly hard.

The painful truth is that the coal mining jobs Trump promised are not coming back. They have been replaced by automation, natural gas and renewable energy sources. Those who surrounded Trump were being conned -- arrogantly -- and in public.

Trump came to office by stoking their legitimate economic anxiety. But he sold them a lie. And, as they discover that lie, their anger will be frightening to behold.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

The Liberals want to change the rules in the House of Commons. They want to limit Justin Trudeau's required appearances in the House to once a week. That's the way the Brits do it. But, Lawrence Martin writes, that won't wash here:

The optics on accountability are dreadful.
That the Liberals were perceived to be intent on proceeding
unilaterally on this and other changes to parliamentary procedure had
critics in high dudgeon.

Trying to
defend the initiative was Liberal House Leader Bardish Chagger. She was
beaten up, as she often is. It’s hardly her fault. She’s a greenhorn, a
36-year-old rookie MP who inexplicably was handed a job that requires
more seasoning than practically any other post in government.

The stench that arises with the abuse of power is growing stronger:

The Liberal gambit comes off as just the
latest in a long line of heavy-handed conduct. Broken promises,
underhanded efforts to limit parliamentary debate, elbowgate, cash for
access fundraisers, secrecy over the Aga Khan trip, so-called open
nominations in ridings, and so on.

Given
all the negative blowback, one would have thought that Mr. Trudeau
would have been particularly sensitive to doing anything that smacked of
anti-democratic arrogance again. Not so.

Martin recognizes Trudeau's unique talents:

Give him his due. He is more accessible, candid and forthright than
other prime ministers and no one should underestimate his impact. In
short order, he completely resurrected the Liberal Party. In short
order, 18 months in office, he has refashioned Canada’s global image.
We’ve gone from being seen as uptight on the right under Mr. Harper to
an open and forward-looking society that much of the world looks up to
under Mr. Trudeau. Doubters need only read the laudatory assessments in
the foreign

media.

Nonetheless, if Canadians get the idea that it's all gone to Justin's head, they'll send him to the showers in the next election.

Keystone’s ultimate rejection by the Obama White House never had anything to do with the environment, of course. A 2015 State Department assessment
stated that “approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project,
including (Keystone XL), is unlikely to significantly impact the rate
of extraction in the oil sands”.

Obama didn’t actually cancel the line until the discount on Alberta
crude disappeared once other pipelines were expanded to eliminate the
bottlenecks. Once it was clear the line was not needed anymore, Obama
announced the rejection — and polished up his environmental cred in the
process.

The truth that no one wants to talk about is that the economic case for Alberta bitumen has collapsed:

When OPEC agreed to cut output, the Saudis and other cartel members
cut production of the kind of crude that fetches the lowest price —
heavy crude. Now Canadian heavy crude and others, like Mexican Maya, are enjoying narrower spreads versus light crude. But since Canadian heavies are increasing production because of investments that were launched before the price of crude collapsed, we are helping to undo the effect of the OPEC cuts.

Couple that with the fact that U.S. shale oil production has improved its cost efficiency — and has now risen back
to production levels higher than they were this time last year — and
you have the reason why crude prices have dropped back below $50 due to
long supplies. The principles of supply and demand are working — and we
can no longer expect substantial future growth in the oilsands.

Monday, March 27, 2017

Around the world, populism is shaking the foundations of what were once liberal democracies. Larry Elliott writes:

The rise of populism has rattled the global political establishment. Brexit came as a shock, as did the victory of Donald Trump. Much head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of their electorates are so cross.

The answer seems pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic
failure. The 10 years since the financial crisis have shown that the
system of economic governance which has held sway for the past four
decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism. Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism.

That's an interesting word. Elliott defines it as "tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and treating people like wage slaves." It is a system which has been "rigged to ensure that the fruits of growth went to the few not to the
many. Unpopulism decreed that those responsible for the global financial
crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of
austerity."

And rather than reversing things, the last ten years have only made the situation worse. Consider how things worked before 1975:

During the business cycle upswing between 1961 and 1969, the bottom 90%
of Americans took 67% of the income gains. During the Reagan expansion
two decades later they took 20%. During the Greenspan housing bubble of
2001 to 2007, they got just two cents in every extra dollar of national
income generated while the richest 10% took the rest.

The US economist Thomas Palley* says that up until the late 1970s
countries operated a virtuous circle growth model in which wages were
the engine of demand growth.

“Productivity growth drove wage growth which fueled demand growth.
That promoted full employment, which provided the incentive to invest,
which drove further productivity growth,” he says.

Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney reversed that virtuous cycle:

James Montier and Philip Pilkington, of the global investment firm
GMO, say that the system which arose in the 1970s was characterised by
four significant economic policies: the abandonment of full employment
and its replacement with inflation targeting; an increase in the
globalisation of the flows of people, capital and trade; a focus on
shareholder maximisation rather than reinvestment and growth; and the
pursuit of flexible labour markets and the disruption of trade unions
and workers’ organisations.

To take just the last of these four pillars, the idea was that trade
unions and minimum wages were impediments to an efficient labour market.
Collective bargaining and statutory pay floors would result in workers
being paid more than the market rate, with the result that unemployment
would inevitably rise.

Unpopulism decreed that the real value of the US minimum wage should
be eroded. But unemployment is higher than it was when the minimum wage
was worth more. Nor is there any correlation between trade union
membership and unemployment. If anything, international comparisons
suggest that those countries with higher trade union density have lower
jobless rates. The countries that have higher minimum wages do not have
higher unemployment rates.

And Mr. Trump and those who favoured Brexit have no intention of reversing what has happened.

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Americans were in danger of losing their health care last week. They dodged a bullet. But there is a bigger danger looming. Tony Burman writes:

During a visit to
South Korea earlier this month, Rex Tillerson, [Donald] Trump’s secretary of
state, announced what appeared to be a dramatic change in American
policy toward the nuclear threat of North Korea.

Since
the diplomacy of the past 20 years has “failed,” he warned, pre-emptive
military action against North Korea is now “on the table.” Tillerson’s warning reflected the U.S. government’s worry that Kim’s renegade regime is accelerating its nuclear program.

Having lost big time in Congress, Trump will not take Korean threats -- which are not new -- lying down:

This nuclear challenge has confronted several
American presidents since the 1990s. It has also frustrated China, North
Korea’s neighbour and chief economic benefactor, which potentially
stands to lose the most if the Korean Peninsula descends into chaos.

This
sudden reference by the Trump administration to the possibility of
pre-emptive military action against North Korea has rattled the region.
There are few informed analysts who see this option, if pursued, as
anything but a certain catastrophe.

North
Korea’s nuclear arsenal is thought to be widely dispersed throughout the
country. No single military strike could destroy it. North Korea also
has an even larger stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.
Analysts believe that an attack would give Kim’s regime ample time to
hit back immediately at neighbouring South Korea and at U.S. military
bases in the region.

The potential death
toll from such a conflict would be breathtaking. South Korea’s capital
city of Seoul has a population of more than 10 million and is only about
50 kilometres from the border.

Mr.Trump was willing to throw 14 million people off medicare. Would the lives of 10 million Koreans lay heavily on his conscience?

Burman writes that "rather than a pre-emptive strike, what is needed is increasing economic
and diplomatic pressure — in tandem with China — to rein in the North
Korean regime."

We saw how Trump operates last week. That's not his style. Nor is it Kim Jong Un's.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Yesterday was quite a day. The Republican repudiation of Barack Obama's health care bill went down to defeat. Ezra Klein doesn't mince words:

Let’s be clear about what happened here. The American Health Care Act
failed because it was a terrible piece of legislation. It would have
thrown 24 million people off insurance and raised deductibles for
millions more — and the savings would’ve gone to pay for tax cuts for
millionaires. It broke virtually all of Donald Trump’s campaign
promises, and was opposed not just by Democrats but also by Republicans.

This is a failure for Speaker Paul Ryan on many levels. He wrote this
bill, and when the speaker takes over the process like that, the upside
is it’s supposed to create legislation that can pass. On this most basic task, Ryan failed, and failed spectacularly.

But beyond the legislative and tactical deficiencies, the AHCA reflected
a deeper failure of moral and policy imagination. Ryan spent the latter
half of Barack Obama’s presidency promising to repair the Republican
Party’s relationship with the poor (remember Ryan’s “poverty tour”?).
He’s spent every day since the passage of Obamacare saying the
Republicans could do better. This is what he came up with? The GOP put
their greatest policy mind in charge of the House of Representatives and
they got ... this?

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of an intellectually and morally bankrupt party. He is the prefect CEO for such an organization. He now claims that he will move on to tax reform and building a wall which the American people -- not the Mexicans -- will pay for.

But it won't be easy accomplishing those objectives. He also plans to build the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. However, the same kind of public opposition to Trumpcare will greet those projects.

Yesterday, Mr. Trudeau applauded the rebirth of Keystone XL. Not a wise move, Justin. Just ask all those Americans who almost lost their health care what it's like to do business with the Great Orange Id.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Rex Tillerson recently told the Journal Review, "“I didn’t want this job, I didn’t seek this job,” but he took it because "“my wife told me I’m supposed to do this.” He may be having second thoughts. Certainly others are. Jonathan Freedland writes that Tillerson's remarks could be read as:

a coded admission that he knows he is not qualified to be secretary of
state, that he’s in way over his head – but we shouldn’t blame him,
because it wasn’t his idea. On this reading, the secretary of state is,
if anything, pointing an accusing finger at his boss: I know I’m rubbish
at this, but it’s Trump’s fault for picking me.

Jonathan Malthorpe is more blunt. Tillerson, he writes, is "clueless:"

His priorities so far are to toady to the world’s autocrats (perhaps
reflecting the instincts of his boss in the Oval Office), while
maintaining Washington’s role as the leader of a 60-year alliance of
democracies is well down his list of concerns.

Tillerson’s tour of Asia last week appears to have given China a
diplomatic coup and unsettled Washington’s Asian allies. They already
had good reason to be twitchy after Trump jettisoned the Trans-Pacific
Partnership — a 12-nation trade and security agreement aimed at
containing China’s regional power ambitions — and opined that Japan and
South Korea should perhaps get their own nuclear weapons instead of
relying on the U.S. for their defence.

That Trump would appoint someone who is so clearly unqualified for the job is not surprising. After all, Trump is clearly unqualified to be president. But, when the blind appoint the blind to important positions, disaster waits in the wings:

Trump has just sent a budget proposal to Congress that envisages cutting
the State Department’s funding by 30 per cent and slashing other
soft-power agencies in a similar way while throwing money at Defense and
other armed agencies. This proposed budget won’t survive the process of
going through Congress in recognizable form. They never do. But the
virgin document speaks volumes about Trump’s view of the world.

It's Trump's vision of the world that's the problem. And, clearly, Tillerson's State Department is not going to champion an alternative universe.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Kevin Page writes that yesterday's budget was not a history making event:

From a fiscal vantage point, Budget 2017 was a very small event. There’s
about $6 billion in new federal resources cumulatively planned for the
next six years. By comparison, Budget 2016 allocated about $11.5 billion
in new resources in year one, rising to $14.5 billion in year two.

The Liberals are still going to run deficits, but they're investing in nothing new and nothing big. And there's not much of a plan:

What will we get for the $140 billion addition to our stock of debt over the next 6 years?

We are doubling infrastructure spending over the next ten years.
Budget 2017 lays out where this money will go. Still, there is no
national needs assessment — no national or sectoral plan. If there is no
plan, how can we hold the government to account?

Budget 2017 lays out a strategy to strengthen skills and innovation.
It may be a good strategy but it’s not a plan. There are commitments to
review existing programs and to work with the provinces to strengthen
labour market agreements. This is all good — but why did we not do the
spending review before Budget 2017, so that we would have resources to
fund new priorities and programs?

Why the caution? The reason, we're told, is that Donald Trump -- ever the disruptor -- hasn't laid out his plan. And, until he does, we are going to tread water.

Like the rest of the world, we're waiting for Donald. But perhaps. like Godot, he'll never show up.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Last week's meeting between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel was -- to put it mildly -- awkward. Joseph Ingram writes:

Take a close look at the body language
on display at that press conference. What we saw was not the courteous
warmth typical of a first encounter between two world leaders with
common interests and similar world views. Rather, we saw what looked
like an encounter between a wiser, more confident, more mature
leader and a petulant, scornful child. And no handshake. No doubt,
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his erstwhile populist allies in
France, Germany and Italy were heartened.

As Trump pursues his American First agenda, he diminishes his -- and his country's authority throughout the world:

Already we see the baton of global leadership being pulled from
America’s grip. President Trump’s criticism of trade alliances, and his
subsequent withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership, led Australian
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to suggest that the partnership be
resurrected — with China replacing the U.S. as the pact’s lynchpin. The
Latin Americans are not far behind him.

There is a growing recognition out there that the Trump/Bannon world
vision is one of tightly-controlled European nation states, which —
along with Russia — could serve as a white Christian bulwark against
Islam and the ‘invasion’ of those job-stealing non-white hordes arriving
from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. In the minds of
those now running the White House, the West should be dominated by
strong Christian nations — the U.S. and Russia, through their respective
spheres of influence — with South Asia dominated by an emerging
Hindu-run India, and East Asia by China, tempered in its ambitions by an
emboldened Japan.

Which means that Canada has to rethink its role in the world. And, as unnerving as that world is, Canada may have a new place in it:

Because of these developments, Canada — as the United States’ racially
and religiously diverse neighbour to the north — finds itself today in a
critical geo-strategic position, linked as it is (economically,
culturally and militarily) with the U.S., while simultaneously
reflecting many of the core liberal democratic values of today’s EU. And
if Europe continues to reject alt-right populism, as it has in Austria
and the Netherlands (and may well do in France and Italy), President
Trump and the U.S. will find themselves even more isolated.

Canada needs to walk a very fine line here. It must balance its economic
and security relationship with the United States (one which, in any
case, needs to be diversified) with the interests of its partners in
Europe, the Commonwealth and the Francophonie. To ensure the long-term
survival of our liberal democracy and economic security, Canada must
establish a more symmetrical balance — one guided not just by American
economic imperatives but equally by the core progressive values it
holds. Values like openness and transparency in the electoral process,
ensuring the tools for economic success are widely available to all
citizens, defending cultural tolerance and diversity and fighting
climate change.

This is a pivotal moment. We will have to decide how to handle the pivot.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Yesterday was a bad day for Donald Trump. If there was one thing that yesterday's hearing made clear, it is that Trump is a Liar --with a capital L. David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times:

I’ve previously argued
that not every untruth deserves to be branded with the L-word, because
it implies intent and somebody can state an untruth without doing so
knowingly. George W. Bush didn’t lie when he said Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction, and Obama didn’t lie when he said people who liked
their current health insurance could keep it. They made careless
statements that proved false (and they deserved much of the criticism
they got).

The question is, how long will he be able to get away with it? Apparently, he'll be able to avoid accountability for quite awhile. The Republicans on the committee focused on the leaks, not the lies. And Sean Spicer

went before the cameras and lied about the closeness between Trump and
various aides who have documented Russian ties. Do you remember Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump’s campaign, who ran the crucial delegate-counting operation? Spicer said Manafort had a “very limited role” in said campaign.

Monday, March 20, 2017

When David Koch was the Libertarian Party's vice presidential candidate in 1980, he and his running mate, Ed Clark, advocated the abolition of public schools, social security and taxation. They garnered one percent of the vote. Koch took the appropriate lesson from the experience. Third parties in the United States are non starters. If you seek political power, you have to capture one of the two major parties. And so, Linda McQuaig writes, Koch and his brother Charles set out to take over the Republican Party:

Operating mostly behind the scenes, and driven by an abiding hatred of
government and anything that smacked of distributing wealth more
broadly, the Kochs invested massively over the next few decades in
creating a vast network of think-tanks, academic programs, front groups,
political action groups and campaigns, lobbyists and politicians, as New Yorker writer Jane Mayer documents in her powerful book Dark Money.

With the election of Donald Trump, they have achieved their objective:

Trump's independence may be overstated; his vice president, Mike
Pence, has been a major recipient of Koch money and was Charles Koch's
first choice for president in 2012. Pence has brought Koch operatives
into the White House and shows signs of becoming a Dick Cheney-style
puppet master. For that matter, the Kochs are only an impeachment away
from having their guy running the free world.

The role of Koch money in shaping Republican politics gets
surprisingly little media attention. But it helps explain the otherwise
baffling behaviour of Republican politicians scrambling to justify
stripping health coverage from their constituents and using the savings
to pay for $600 billion worth of tax cuts for the rich. Awkward.

Meanwhile, many Republicans in the "freedom caucus," who've been heavily
funded by the Kochs, consider the proposed reform too generous to the
disadvantaged.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Maureen Dowd's analyses of presidential character are always interesting. She uses Freudian and Shakespearean analogies and, for students of literature like herself, she makes interesting reading. She cottoned on early to Oedipal issues in George W. Bush, as the son vainly tried to live up to his father's expectations. In yesterday's New York Times she turned her attention to Donald Trump. She wrote:

Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, Donald Trump has
disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories. As he rages in
the storm, Lear-like, howling about poisonous fake news, he is spewing
poisonous fake news.

He
trusts his beliefs more than facts. So many secrets, so many plots, so
many shards of gossip swirl in his head, there seems to be no room for
reality.

His
grandiosity, insularity and scamming have persuaded Trump to believe he
can mold his own world. His distrust of the deep state, elites and
eggheads — an insecurity inflamed by Steve Bannon — makes it hard for
him to trust his own government, or his own government’s facts.

Trump's disdain for facts is particularly disturbing:

According to CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, Trump got furious reading a Breitbart report that regurgitated a theory by conservative radio host Mark Levin that Barack Obama and his allies had staged a “silent coup.”

It is surpassingly strange that the president would not simply pick up
the phone and call his intelligence chiefs before spitting out an
inflammatory accusation with no proof, just as it was bizarre that Trump
shrugged off the regular intelligence briefings after he was elected.
He preferred living in his own warped world.

And Trump's minions -- who were hired for their loyalty, not their brains -- make fools of themselves trying to explain Trump to the world:

Sean Spicer offered a shaky Jenga tower of media citations to back up
the president, including the contention of Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano
that Obama had used GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, to spy on
Trump.

But the world isn' t buying what they're selling:

In a rare public statement, the GCHQ called the claim “utterly ridiculous.”

Fox
News also demurred, with Shepard Smith saying it “knows of no evidence
of any kind that the now president of the United States was surveilled
at any time, in any way. Full stop.”

Even
Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave up the
Sisyphean effort of defending Trump’s tripe. He said that if you took
Trump’s remarks “literally” — as we expect to do with our commander in
chief’s words — “clearly the president was wrong.”

Only those who live in Trumpworld believe him. And, as the believers fall away, Trump diminishes himself with each passing day. He is the disappearing president.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Henry Giroux writes that, if we are looking for a way to explain the rise of Donald Trump, we should look to our memories -- which Giroux believes we have lost:

Trump is the fascist shadow that has been lurking in the dark since
Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Authoritarianism has now become viral in
America, pursuing new avenues to spread its toxic ideology of bigotry,
cruelty, and greed into every facet of society. Its legions of
“alt-right” racists, misogynists, and xenophobic hate-mongers now expose
themselves publicly, without apology, knowing full well that they no longer have to use code for their hatred of all those who do not fit into their white-supremacist and ultra-nationalist script.

Trump’s victory makes clear that the economic crisis and the misery
it has spurred has not been matched by an ideological crisis– a crisis
of ideas, education, and values. Critical analysis and historical memory
have given way to a culture of spectacles, sensationalism, and
immediacy. Dangerous memories are now buried in a mass bombardment of
advertisements, state sanctioned lies, and a political theater of
endless spectacles. The mainstream media is now largely an adjunct of
the entertainment industries and big corporations. Within the last 40
years training has taken the place of critical education, and the call
for job skills has largely replaced critical thinking. Without an
informed public, there is no resistance in the name of democracy and
justice; nor is there a model of individual and collective agency rising
to such an occasion.

There was a time when the memory of Fascism in Europe was still fresh. But it's been seventy years since the end of the Second World War. We are three generations away from that event. And those who lived through it are dying off. Giroux writes that a memory is a terrible thing to waste, because once it is gone, what is left in its wake is ignorance. And those who assume power compound the problem by manufacturing ignorance:

Manufactured ignorance erases histories of repression, exploitation, and
revolts. What is left is a space of fabricated absences that makes it
easy, if not convenient, to forget that Trump is not some eccentric
clown offered up to the American polity through the deadening influence
of celebrity and consumer culture. State and corporate sponsored
ignorance produced primarily through the disimagination machines of the
mainstream media and public relations industries in diverse forms now
function chiefly to erase selected elements of history, disdain critical
thought, reduce dissent to a species of fake news, and undermine the
social imagination. How else to explain the recent Arkansas legislator
who is pushing legislation to ban the works
of the late historian Howard Zinn? How else to explain a culture awash
in game shows and Realty TV programs? How else to explain the aggressive
attack by extremists in both political parties on public and higher
education? Whitewashing history is an urgent matter, especially for the
Trump administration, which has brought a number of white supremacists to the center of power in the United States.

It is abundantly apparent that Donald Trump is a profoundly ignorant man. And those who elected him are equally ignorant of the world in which they live.

Friday, March 17, 2017

There was a collective sigh of relief when Geert Wilders did not come out on top in the Netherlands election. But Tom Walkom warns that all is not sweetness and light:

Wilder’s Freedom
Party still did well. It came a strong second, winning five additional
seats in the 150-person legislature, for a total of 20.

More important, other parties felt compelled to ape Wilders, at least in part.

Prime
Minister Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy ran on a
platform of economic liberalism and cultural nationalism, warning
immigrants to adopt Dutch values or leave.

If there was any saving grace, it was the pledges of the other parties that they would not work with Wilders. But the way seats are spread among the other parties is a bit troubling:

Rutte’s party lost eight seats but still managed to come first with 33.

The
Christian Democratic Appeal, another conservative party, campaigned on a
nationalist platform that included banning dual citizenship and
requiring schoolchildren to sing the national anthem.

That,
too, worked. The Christian Democrats saw their seat total rise from 13
to 19, virtually guaranteeing them a central role in whatever coalition
government emerges.

Much has been made of Jesse Klaver’s Green Left party, which saw its seat share rise from four to 14.

The
30-year-old Klaver is of Moroccan and Indonesian heritage. He supports
immigration, the EU and efforts to combat climate change. With his
movie-star looks and dark, wavy hair he has been called Holland’s Justin
Trudeau.

His success, as well as that of
the pro-Europe D66 party, which went from 12 to 19 seats, underlines
just how complicated the new populism is.

And, as is the case with any coalition government, everything depends on how well Rutte can get a team of rivals to work together. If he fails, the number two man may step in.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Yesterday, a judge in Hawaii issued a Temporary Restraining Order against Donald Trump's second travel ban. Last night, in Nashville, Trump fulminated against the judge's decision to a chorus of boos. If you read the decision, the judge's language is quite curt:

The Government appropriately cautions that, in determining purpose,
courts should not look into the ‘veiled psyche’ and ‘secret motives’ of
government decision-makers and may not undertake a ‘judicial
psychoanalysis of a drafter’s heart of hearts’.

The Government need not fear. The remarkable facts at issue here require no such impermissible inquiry.

For instance, there is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release: ‘Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’

Nor is there anything ‘secret’ about the Executive’s motive specific to the issuance of the Executive Order:

Rudolph Giuliani explained on television how the Executive Order came
to be. He said: “When [Mr. Trump] first announced it, he said, ‘Muslim
ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the
right way to do it legally.’”

Trump assumes that the courts will forget about what he has said as quickly as he does. And he assumes that no one will see through the true intent of his actions. But judges aren't as stupid as he claims they are:

When signing the first Executive Order [No. 13,769], President Trump
read the title, looked up, and said: ‘We all know what that means.’
President Trump said he was ‘establishing a new vetting measure to keep
radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America’, and
that: ‘We don’t want them here.’

These plainly-worded statements, made in the months leading up to and
contemporaneous with the signing of the Executive Order, and, in many
cases, made by the Executive himself, betray the Executive Order’s
stated secular purpose.

Any reasonable, objective observer would conclude, as does the Court
for purposes of the instant Motion for TRO, that the stated secular
purpose of the Executive Order is, at the very least, ‘secondary to a
religious objective’ of temporarily suspending the entry of Muslims.

The judge sees through the Donald. He is just as blunt in dismissing Trump's executive order as Trump is when dismissing his opponents. What goes around comes around.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Mr. Justice Robin Camp has resigned. You may remember that Camp is the Alberta judge who wondered why a woman who appeared in his courtroom -- alleging that she had been sexually assaulted -- couldn't keep her knees together. He recently underwent a "re-education" regime. Gerry Caplan writes:

Since the rape trial at which he presided so ignorantly, many had argued
for the need to educate Mr. Camp in the ways of women and the world.
Several feminist scholars were even brought in to give him what was
called “in-depth counselling” – a kind of crash course, I guess, on
modern women. Three of them decided that he was genuinely interested in
changing.

The same goes for his colleague in
Halifax, Judge Gregory Lenehan, who in his recent ruling on a sex
assault case said “a drunk can consent.” Right. Even when they’re found
unconscious in the back of a cab and had peed themselves.

Who
are these judges? Have they been on Mars? Do they represent the male
judges at the pinnacle of our criminal justice system? Were they
unconscious while the endless struggle for women’s equality and a
woman’s right to be respected played out as front-page news?

Both men are not uneducated. But both men are ignorant. Caplan argues that the antidote for ignorance is paying attention:

Justice Camp was a university graduate; a well-paid professional. We
have the right to expect judges like him to be aware of their
surroundings. Of basic morality. When asked why his cabinet was
gender-balanced, the Prime Minister said, simply, “Because it’s 2015.”
Everyone, but everyone, knew what he meant. No special courses were
required by anyone.

It's not just judges. Lots of folks are simply not paying attention. And there is always a price to be paid for ignorance.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

The Congressional Budget Office has just released its analysis of Trumpcare. It concludes that, by next year, fourteen million of the twenty million Americans who now have healthcare won't have it. Republicans argue that Americans will be able to choose the healthcare they want. Consider what they are really saying: Fourteen million Americans will be free to choose the healthcare they can't get. It's sheer lunacy.

The Washington Post's Catherine Rempel writes that the Trump administration is full of lunatics. Consider Kellyanne Conway's explanation of how Barack Obama tapped Trump's telephone:

Over the weekend, Bergen Record columnist Mike Kelly asked Conway point blank, “Do you know whether Trump Tower was wiretapped?”

Conway’s
response: “What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other
now, unfortunately. . . . There was an article this week that talked
about how you can surveil someone through their phones, through their —
certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways.
And microwaves that turn into cameras, et cetera.”

Trump's budget director Mick Mulvaney has agreed with Trump -- until now -- that you can't trust the information published by the Bureau of Labour Statistics:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been calculating the unemployment rate the same way since 1940. But Mulvaney nevertheless supports the theories of his tinfoil-hat-wearing boss, who throughout the presidential campaign called the
unemployment rate a “hoax” and “totally fiction.” Most recently Trump
relayed through his press secretary that the jobs report “may have been
phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

Trump's EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt "suggested that — despite the overwhelming scientific consensus — carbon dioxide may not be a “primary contributor” to climate change." Trump appointee Curtis Ellis, who works in the Labour Department, " previously argued that Democrats were engaged in “ethnic cleansing” of working-class whites." And Sid Bowdidge " the massage therapist with no relevant experience. . . landed a job as a political appointee at the Energy Department, despite tweeting that Muslims ought to be exterminated and Obama was related to radical Islamist terrorists."

Monday, March 13, 2017

Canadians like to think that, as a nation, we value diversity. Bob Rae reminds us that we haven't always felt that way:

Canada’s commitment to diversity and pluralism
has become a critical feature of our identity. For many generations we
were no such thing — a deputy minister of immigration in the 1930s was
asked how many Jews would be admitted that year. His reply was
devastatingly simple: “None is too many.” Chinese immigrants paid a head
tax. Japanese and others were rounded up and lost all their property
and livelihood in the Second World War. The litany of exclusion and
discrimination is long — and we lapse into it still today.

A
particular kind of brutality was imposed on the indigenous community.
Children were rounded up and taken away to boarding schools whose
mission was appallingly simple — “to take the Indian out of the child.”
This was the policy of the government of Canada from the 1830s to as
recently as the early 1990s. The Chief Justice of Canada has called it
“cultural genocide.” This is the system a Tory Senator wants to defend
and find the “positive parts of this experience.” This mind boggling
comment has rightly set off a firestorm.

South of the 49th parallel, there is a rising tide against people who don't look and sound like us. And -- particularly in the Conservative Party -- one hears echoes of Trumpian nationalism. Rae warns that:

The blustering nationalism he now champions
runs contrary to everything America has stood for in the world. Other
countries will have to counter what he is doing and saying by insisting
that pluralism, openness, and embracing the dignity of difference need
to lie at the core of international politics.

“America First” is a dead end, because it will only lead to everyone else insisting on the same protectionism.

We should learn from our own history. And we certainly should not repeat the American present.

Sunday, March 12, 2017

I often disagree with David Brooks. But I read his columns in The New York Times because I find them interesting and occasionally intriguing. On Friday, he predicted that the Republican attempt to "reform" Obamacare would fail. But then he went on to suggest that its failure marked the dawn of a new era in American politics. It is an era, he writes, that has been presaged by three crises:

First, the crisis of opportunity. People with fewer skills were seeing
their wages stagnate, the labor markets evaporate. Second, the crisis of
solidarity. The social fabric, especially for those without a college
degree, was disintegrating — marriage rates plummeting, opiate abuse
rates rising. Third, the crisis of authority. Distrust in major
institutions crossed some sort of threshold. People had so lost trust in
government, the media, the leadership class in general, that they were
willing to abandon truth and decorum and embrace authoritarian thuggery
to blow it all up.

For Brooks, the Republican attempt to destroy Obamacare is a symptom, not a cause:

If
President Obama had made these crises the center of his administration,
instead of the A.C.A., Democrats wouldn’t have lost Congress and the
White House. If the Tea Party had understood the first two of these
crises, there would have been no opening for Donald Trump.

Trump
came along and exploited these crises. But if his administration’s
health care approach teaches us anything, it is that he has no positive
agenda for addressing them. He can tap into working class anxiety
negatively, by harnessing hostility toward immigrants, foreigners and
the poor. But he can’t come up with a positive agenda to make working
class life more secure.

For the last four decades we have operated on a thesis popularized by the Austrian professors and their acolyte, Milton Friedman. They believed that a strong market is preferable to a strong state. But Brooks suggests we need both:

The core of the new era is this: If you want to preserve the market, you
have to have a strong state that enables people to thrive in it. If you
are pro-market, you have to be pro-state. You can come up with
innovative ways to deliver state services, like affordable health care,
but you can’t just leave people on their own. The social fabric, the
safety net and the human capital sources just aren’t strong enough.

Can we have both? I have not thought through Brooks' thesis. That will take time. But I'd be interested to know what readers think of it.

Saturday, March 11, 2017

The Conservative leadership race is almost at the finish line. And the contestants are firing up their base, not building a big tent. Bruce Anderson writes:

On a range of policy
issues, the Conservatives seem determined to re-create the same
coalition of voters that supported them in 2015, when they were handed
their hat. Stephen Harper’s party bet heavily against compassion for
refugees and tolerance towards Muslim immigrants. Most observers in the
Party acknowledged that the low point of the campaign was when Kellie
Leitch and Chris Alexander stood at a podium to announce that Canada
needed a special measure—a toll free snitch line—to report the barbarism
of your next door Muslim.

That didn’t work very
well. But both those former Ministers are running, and hanging out with
the Ezra Levant crowd which never wants to talk about anything else.
Too often the only news about this race was the fight over who cares
enough to keep Canada ‘Canadian’, if you know what we mean.

To win an election in Canada, a party has to do what Justin Trudeau did -- appeal to millennials:

You don’t have to be
elbows deep in polling data to know intuitively what we see in our
studies—that most young people are progressive and open minded, global
in outlook, interested in new ideas, compassionate about the refugees,
concerned about climate change, and inspired by technology and
innovation.

Younger voters want
smart, creative thinking about how to shape an evolving Canadian economy
in a constantly disrupted world. They want a society that’s welcoming
and open, not suspicious, anxious and closed.

They need a big tent. But Conservatives seem obsessed with keeping "the wrong kind of people" out.

Friday, March 10, 2017

There is an old journalistic trick. It's called planting a story. Only now it's done online. And Chrystia Freeland is the latest example of how it works. Michael Harris writes:

This week, one of the true stars of Canadian journalism, Bob Fife, published a story in the Globe & Mail
that made waves. And for good reason. It hit all the hot buttons from
bygone wars. According to Fife’s story, Freeland had known for 20 years
that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a
Nazi-controlled newspaper in occupied Poland.

Although Freeland had mentioned her maternal grandparents in articles
and books, she had never stated that her grandfather, Mikhail Chomiak,
had been a Nazi propagandist for the Krakow News. Or that the
paper had published articles supporting Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies.
This, despite the fact that Freeland helped edit a scholarly article
written by her uncle on this very subject back in 1996.

Where did the story come from? We're learning that Russia plants lots of stories these days. Why? Well, consider:

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 in the wake of a so-called
“referendum”, Canada imposed sanctions against Moscow. In retaliation,
Freeland and twelve other prominent Canadians, including then-Liberal MP
Irwin Cotler, were banned from travelling to Russia. Cotler had long
advocated on behalf of political prisoners in Russia and was a supporter
of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who died in prison after
accusing Russian officials of colluding with organized criminals.

It was after Freeland was appointed minister of Foreign Affairs that
stories began to appear on the internet, especially on pro-Vladimir
Putin websites — stories about the Ukrainian side of her family. They
had titles such as “A Nazi Skeleton in the Family Closet”. Her maternal
grandfather, Mikhail Chomiak, grew up in Western Ukraine and graduated
with a Master’s degree in law and political science from Lviv
University. He became a journalist in 1928.

The stories on these pro-Russian websites detailed how during the
Nazi occupation Chomiak edited a Ukrainian language newspaper, Krakivski Visti,
that spread anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda. Some of Ukraine’s most
prominent intellectuals wrote for the paper — those who had survived
mass arrests and executions. The newspaper has been described as “a
Ukrainian paper edited within the German reality.” It was a kind way of
describing collaboration.

After the war, Chomiak immigrated to Canada. His daughter —
Freeland’s mother, Halyna — was born in a displaced persons camp in
Germany. Her paternal grandmother was a war bride from Glasgow — lucky
to be on the winning side of a war that crushed so many young people.

Freeland got back on Russia’s radar as Canada’s policy on Ukraine
developed with the Liberals in charge. On March 6, 2017, Canada
announced a two-year extension of Canada’s military training mission in
Ukraine — Operation Unifier, which is part of a wider NATO mission. She
was seen as an enemy of Russia with a personal animus against the
Kremlin.

Knowing what we now know about Russian interference in the American election, we'd be foolish to think that the Russians will leave us -- or any perceived enemy -- alone. But there are a couple of lessons to be drawn from all of this:

1. All of us have skeletons in our closet. And all of us have relatives -- past and present -- who have not been paragons of virtue. That knowledge should, but often doesn't, vaccinate us against self- righteousness.

2. The sources we choose for our information are critically important. It would appear that Donald Trump has been relying on Breitbart News to explain the world to him.That fact might go a long way to explain why every time he opens his mouth he can't be believed.

Thursday, March 09, 2017

Around the world, immigrants are becoming the enemies of those who see themselves as "we, the people." South of us, that rage wears a large orange face. But the disease is creeping north, across the border. Andrew Coyne writes:

Whether it is Kelly Leitch’s insinuation that immigrants need to be
instructed in such Canadian values as hard work (“Do you recognize (you)
can’t expect to have things you want given to you?”) or Kevin O’Leary’s
instantaneously discovered concern for closing the “loophole” in
Canada’s refugee system (“Canada can’t afford to sit back & watch
thousands of people walk right into our country … pretending to be
refugees”) or Maxime Bernier’s weird demand that immigration policy
“should not aim to forcibly change the cultural character and social
fabric of Canada,” there’s evidently a market for this sort of thing.

The debate is all about the meaning of citizenship and the assumptions which underlie the concept:

One is the notion that birthright — where you were born, or who you were
born to — should confer automatic right to citizenship. Heredity is not
usually considered an appropriate basis for assigning status and
rights in modern societies. Yet while a landed immigrant may live and
work here for years without being entitled to citizenship, should you
have been born here while your parents were changing flights en route to
Mongolia, you’re considered one of us.

The other, more basic assumption is that those born here have the
automatic right to prevent others from joining them. Of course any
society is entitled to set the terms of the social contract, that is the
rights and obligations that go with membership, such as paying your
taxes, obeying the law and so forth. But immigrants are not asking to be
let out of the social contract: they ask only to be allowed to sign it.
That they are nonetheless prevented from doing so, and on no other
basis than where they were born, seems arbitrary in the extreme.

And there's the rub. Some of us have been blessed with good fortune. Others, like the millions of displaced people these days, seem to be followed by ill fortune and ill will wherever they go. Coyne reminds his readers that those of us who have the benefit of good fortune need to walk in the shoes of the displaced:

Certainly there is no “natural” or “right” level of population for a
country, but if there were it would be an astonishing coincidence if,
wherever we were, we should happen to be precisely at it. And yet that
is the very thing our immigration restrictionists assert. Indeed, they
always have.

If the restrictionists had had their way, most of us wouldn't be here.

Wednesday, March 08, 2017

But with the release of the House Republican “replacement” (I use that
term loosely) for Obamacare, it’s worth returning to the analogy. It
rests, in part, on the work of the political scientist Stephen
Skowronek, who argues that certain presidencies are “disjunctive” —
straddling a political order passing into history and another one
struggling to be born. And “disjunctive” generally means ineffective,
because the parties such presidents are leading are likewise trapped
between past and future and unable to unify and act.

The release of the Republican Plan to replace Obamacare has made clear yet again how disjunctive the Republican Party really is:

In the long Reagan era, the Republican Party was, in effect, the party
of the health care status quo — bending to accept certain expansions of
the welfare state (S-CHIP, a prescription drug benefit in Medicare) in
order to forestall a larger government takeover of health insurance.

By the late 2000s, however, the decline in employer-provided coverage
and the steady rise of health care costs made status-quo politics
untenable: Too many workers who made too much to qualify for Medicaid
were unable to afford insurance. Meanwhile, over the same period,
Republicans were winning more working-class votes, which meant that
their own constituents increasingly stood to benefit from a
coverage-expanding health care reform.

When it comes to public healthcare, the Republicans are still the Party of No

because the party’s limited-government ideology was hostile to increased
spending, and many of its strongest interest groups stood to lose out
from reform. So resist the G.O.P. did — sometimes by embracing a more
libertarian vision of health care, but more often by incoherently and
opportunistically attacking whatever the Democrats proposed.

And now that they are in the driver's seat the Party is attacking what its leaders propose. They are what they have been for a long time -- an opposition party which has forgotten how to govern.

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

A lot has been written about the Conservative leadership race. But, so far, the contest for the leadership of the NDP has generated little comment -- mainly because, until recently, nobody wanted the job. But now that Peter Julian, Charlie Angus and Guy Caron have put in their applications, attention will tip toward the Dippers.

But, Tom Walkom writes, interest in the party's future does not mean that it will turn to the left. The Leap Manifesto was an attempt to steer the party in that direction. However,

the brief excitement over the so-called LEAP Manifesto — a clarion call to fight climate change — seems to have ebbed.

With the exception of
British Columbia MP Peter Julian, who explicitly opposes all pipeline
projects aimed at moving bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands, the leadership
candidates have been eloquently vague on the topic of climate change.

Angus,
an MP from Northern Ontario, says Canada must move toward a green
economy and away from fossil fuels. But he also says this must be done
in way that doesn’t penalize workers in the energy sector — which is the
position of Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley, Mulcair and Liberal
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Julian and Quebec MP Caron favour a fairer tax system. But they are vague on how they would accomplish that.

Angus
has said he wants to find out what New Democrats are thinking before he
comes up with specific policy pronouncements on taxes or anything else.

The fixation with taxes indicates that the party -- like Canada's two other major parties -- is still firmly in the grip of Neo-liberalism. And when it comes to free trade and deficits:

Free trade? The NDP used to be against it. But
the party has watered down its opposition. Under Mulcair, it actively
embraced a free-trade pact with South Korea.

In
this leadership race, the candidates to date have taken carefully
ambiguous positions on trade and investment deals. Julian wants “fair
trade,” a term used by both the Canadian labour movement and U.S.
President Donald Trump. Caron says he wants “trade deals that work for
Canada.”

Deficits? Mulcair was hammered
from within his own party for vowing during the last election campaign
to balance the budget no matter what, thereby allowing Trudeau to
outflank the NDP from the left.

But the
NDP’s official policy, like that of the Conservatives, is to balance the
books over the length of any boom and bust business cycle — by running
deficits in lean years and surpluses in fat ones.

It appears that all three parties are offering the same menu. The only differences deal with the way they spice up the meal.

Monday, March 06, 2017

Reports are that Friday was a rough day at the White House. Having discovered that his attorney general had recused himself from all investigations of Russian meddling in the American election, Donald Trump went ballistic and reamed out his staff for allowing Jeff Sessions to step aside. Then he headed to Florida to play golf. At six o'clock Trump sent out a series of tweets claiming -- with no supporting evidence -- that Barack Obama had tapped his phone. Michael Harris writes:

What he came up with was fresh from the outbox of Elsie the Cow.

Even the language was improbable. Do you know anyone who suspects
they are under covert surveillance who says they had their “wires
tapped”?

Most people would say “I’ve been wiretapped.” Or that “My phone’s
been tapped.” Who says “I just found out I had my wires tapped.”? What
wires? The ones sticking out of his tin-foil hat when he communes with
Agent Mulder’s clientele?

Once again, Trump revealed his ignorance of the government he is supposed to lead. The law specifically forbids a president from doing what Trump claims Obama did. Trump's phone could only be tapped with the approval of a judge. And former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper -- who was in office at the time the telephone would have been tapped says he is not aware of any such authorization.

Trump is engaging in an old tactic -- the counter suit. When Trump went bankrupt in 2008, Trump went to court an argued that he shouldn't have to pay back the money because the Great Recession was an extraordinary event. In fact, he told the court that Deutsch Bank -- by his calculations owed him $3 million. Harris writes:

Trump is indulging in self-exoneration. He is not only saying that every
intelligence agency in the United States has it wrong; he’s saying he
is the victim of a wire tap, just now uncovered, that he wants the
Congress of the United States to investigate.

Get it? Congress and the FBI are investigating the wrong president. They
shouldn’t be investigating Donald J. Trump, America’s most patriotic
plutocrat. They should be looking into whether one of the most popular
and scandal-free presidents in American history abused the investigative
powers of U.S. law enforcement in his final days and tapped into the
Trump Towers looking for dirt. The Trump counter-punch is always aimed
at the crotch.

Sunday, March 05, 2017

The wealthy still call the shots. If you doubt that assertion, consider recent revelations about Fintrac. Alan Freeman writes:

Time and again, Fintrac and the Canadian government have been called out
by the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental group that
develops international standards in the fight against money laundering,
for weak laws and half-hearted enforcement. Instead of being a leader,
Canada has earned a reputation as a laggard in this battle.

This lukewarm commitment by Ottawa to policing money-laundering wasn’t
helped by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 2015 that exempted lawyers
from mandatory reporting of suspicious transactions, accepting the view
that this would somehow violate solicitor-client privilege. Welcome,
kleptocrats. Canada is beckoning.

If you want to launder money, you need secrecy. And Fintrac can and does provide it:

In almost 10 years of existence, [Fintrac has] assessed financial penalties
only 95 times — mostly small fines aimed at currency dealers and
jewellers who haven’t kept proper records.

Then, last April, Fintrac finally landed a big fish.
For the first time, a bank had been caught breaking the rules by
failing to report a suspicious transaction and an undisclosed number of
money transfers. It was fined a record $1,154,670 — but Fintrac decided
to undermine its own action by using its discretion and refusing to name
the guilty party.

Again, it was the dogged work of journalists — at the Toronto Star, National Observer
and CBC — that identified Manulife Bank of Canada, a subsidiary of one
of our biggest life insurance companies, as the offending institution.
According to these reports, Manulife was guilty of five different
violations of the law, including failure to report a suspicious
transaction with a client who was a convicted felon and failure to
report 1,174 international wire transfers of $10,000 or more involving
other clients, as well as an overall lack of anti-money-laundering
policies.

The little guys haven't received that kind of treatment:

While Manulife could hide in obscurity, protected by Fintrac’s
discretion, dozens of tiny outfits have been named and shamed by the
same agency and have paid the price in lost reputation. “It’s very
unfair to name someone and not name someone else,” Michael Baumbach of
the Diamond Exchange told the Toronto Star after his business,
which has three employees, was named by Fintrac and fined $12,750 for
violations on the same day that Manulife was fined and got its omerta
protection. Why Fintrac has named 40 of its violators over the past
nine years while protecting the identities of the other 55 is anybody’s
guess.

There is a myth that F. Scott Fitzgerald once told Earnest Hemingway, "The rich are different from you and me." Hemingway responded, "Yes, they have more money." The incident never happened. But the point behind it is still true. The rich buy influence. And, thus, they have more power.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.